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The popular online retailer, Amazon, today launched textbook rentals for the upcoming Fall semester that hopes to put a serious dent in current textbook prices. As many of you know, textbooks are almost always sold by the college itself, but at much higher prices than you can find elsewhere.

Sometimes you only save $10 or $20, but other times you can save over $100 per textbook, which is a significant savings for any cash-strapped college student.

A close source to Facebook has told Reuters that Facebook plans to buy Skype at $4 billion, which is a lot more money than what it’s worth, about $1 billion. Consider this a game of monopoly when you already own 2 orange properties and you’re trading for the third orange property. The other player won’t sell you that third orange property to create your monopoly unless it is for a high price. How does four times the value sound? Sounds just like Monopoly to me.

Acer reported today a disappointing sales quota. The company experienced it’s lowest profit since 2004. The cause? All the hype over the iPad and the iPad 2, as well as the surge of many other tablets. Acer’s net income took a dive 64% to just over $41 million, the lowest since Spring 2004. The company even stated that the third quarter might see meager results as well.

Acer has been known to be losing ground in the notebook market, with many consumers switching over to tablets. Although Acer has long denied the fact of the iPad’s success, it is a fact hard to deny with such low profits. Unfortunately, Acer’s revenue consists of about three quarters of the company, with desktops and mobile devices making up just a quarter of its revenue.

In a time of buyouts, Wal-Mart is buying Kosmix, a social media company that is based in the heart of silicon valley, Mountain View, California. Although Wal-Mart did not mention specifics of the agreement, they did say that the acquisition will be instrumental in rolling out new social and mobile initiatives.

Wal-Mart continued in saying that the @WalmartLabs team will work hard on building its social and mobile commerce strategy in efforts to keep its online and in-store avenues in tact. I believe this is a necessary move for Wal-Mart, a corporation that now has physical stores in 15 countries and e-commerce businesses in nine countries.

After ten years, the U.S. has finally killed a botnet that has spread a continually evolving virus known as “Coreflood.” The botnet first became active in 2001 and has steadily infected computers finally reaching a number of 2 million computers worldwide, with the assistance of malware. Coreflood has stolen a total near 100 million dollars worldwide from both businesses and consumers. The botnet of course is a group of infected machines that “work together” to steal personal data from other users. The botnets can also be programmed to send malicious files, spam, and phishing e-mails to targeted computers. The creators of the botnet used Coreflood to steal information and conduct thousands of fraudulent banking and wire transfers. Some individuals lost as much as $240,000 in the scam.

Senators John McCain and John Kerry are seriously considering to introduce a bill a week from Wednesday that will limit what companies can do with online user activity and profile data. The bill will require that the sharing of user data between companies be an “opt-in” feature that users can choose if they want to share personal information about them. While this bill sounds good on paper, it will definitely limit the amount of “pool data” available which may have unforeseeable consequences on many features we rely on. I do however, like the option of opting in and hope that if the bill does get passed, people will not be too paranoid about sharing certain kinds of information.

Microsoft has spent 7.5 million dollars to remain competitive in the Internet Protocol industry. The seven and a half million dollars covers 666,624 IPv4 addresses. Although we were supposed to have transitioned to IPv6 addresses by now, Microsoft has taken sharp notice of the IPv6 delay and realizes that IPv4 addresses are becoming scarce. For those who need a quick refresher on internet protocols, IPv4 stands for Internet Protocol version 4 and is the fourth revision in Internet Protocol development, also the first to be…